The study of second langiage (L2) speech production has a long history in second language (SLA) research, both for what it can tell us about the development of the specific skill and how it might illuminate the general processes of SLA. Over time, studies in L2 phonological attainment have become a battleground for perennial issues in SLA research encompassing cognitive, psychological, and soci...

In this paper, we introduce block insertion and deletion on trajectories, which provide us with a new framework to study properties of language operations. With the parallel syntactical constraint provided by trajectories, these operations properly generalize several sequential as well as parallel binary language operations such as catenation, sequential insertion, k-insertion, parallel inserti...

This corpus-based study compares the use of the alternating ditransitive verb TELL by native speakers and Chinese learners of English. The corpora used are the written sub-corpus of ICE-GB (the British component of International Corpus of English) and CLEC (the Chinese Learner English Corpus). CLEC consists of both lowand high-proficiency L2 learners’ writing. By incorporating corpus contrastiv...

although the majority of linguists believing in chomskyan revolution have no doubt about the presence of ug in ll acquisition, its availability in l2 acquisition _in general, and in adult l2 acquisition in particular, is controversial. on the one hand, there are proponents of the access to ug in l2 acquisition, lidia white for example, says: therange of option available to the second language l...

This paper sought to determine whether L1 vowel inventory size could be a contributing factor to the use of temporal cues in L2 vowel perception. The participants were L1 Catalan (n=20) and L1 Danish (n=20) EFL learners and L1 English control group (n=7). We hypothesized that the smaller vowel inventory of Catalan could result in difficulties in discerning spectral di...

In this fMRI study we contrasted emotional responses to literary reading in late bilinguals' first or second language. German participants with adequate English proficiency in their second language (L2) English read short text passages from Harry Potter books characterized by a "negative" or "positive" versus "neutral" emotional valence manipulation. Previous studies have suggested that given s...

The present study examines the coordination of lexical and paralinguistic F0 in second language (henceforth L2) production. We tested how L2 learners manage to handle F0 when F0 in their first language (henceforth L1) carries a paralinguistic function, but a lexical one in their L2 and vice versa. Participants (fifteen L1 Japanese speakers and fifteen L1 German speakers, proficient also in thei...

English is currently described in many different ways: as "world language", "global "lingua franca", "connected etc. This article highlights the role of that being taught from three perspectives, namely a first or native language (L1), second (L2), foreign (FL) and some challenges global language.

We present a new cross-lingual task for SemEval concerning the translation of L1 fragments in an L2 context. The task is at the boundary of Cross-Lingual Word Sense Disambiguation and Machine Translation. It finds its application in the field of computer-assisted translation, particularly in the context of second language learning. Translating L1 fragments in an L2 context allows language learn...

This study reports the results of two experiments with native speakers of Japanese. In experiment 1, near-monolingual Japanese listeners participated in a cross-language mapping experiment in which they identified English and Japanese consonants in terms of a Japanese category, then rated the identifications for goodness-of-fit to that Japanese category. Experiment 2 used the same set of stimul...